Rutherford, A., Marecek, J., & Sheese, K. (2013). Psychology of women and gender. In D. K. Freedheim & I. B. Weiner (Eds.), Handbook of psychology: History of psychology(2nd ed., pp. 279–301). John Wiley & Sons, Inc..
Abstract
Psychology of women and gender has a short history: It coalesced as a formal subdiscipline of psychology during the early years of the women’s movement in the late 1960s and early 1970s. In contrast to this short history, the field has a much longer past when one considers that treatises on female (or feminine) subjectivity/psychology and on the relations between the sexes have been written throughout history. In an effort to bring the historical record into alignment with the field’s long past, we begin our historical overview of the psychology of women and gender at one turning point in this long past, specifically, the inception of scientific psychology in Western Europe and North America in the late 1800s. The history of the psychological study of women and gender is closely linked not only to a body of scholarship and research, but also to the personal experiences of the women who developed it and the heavily gendered contexts in which they worked. Political, social, and cultural changes in the status of women have unfolded synergistically with the social scientific study of women and gender. As Rosenberg has noted, although the work of early female social scientists was affected and supported by changing social beliefs about women, their work simultaneously helped alter these beliefs: “Trained as social scientists in the new research universities of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, these women formulated theories about intelligence, personality development, and sex roles that not only altered American thinking about the nature of women and men, but also affected the whole course of American social science”. In this chapter, we first describe the long past of women’s struggles for a presence in the field, noting how those struggles often animated their scholarly projects. Our goal is to point to women who might otherwise be forgotten and to the conditions of work they faced. (An extensive online resource featuring biographical information about women in psychology and contemporary feminist psychologists can be found at www.feministvoices .com). Then we turn to the era in which a subfield of psychology concerned with women and gender developed. We briefly note some areas of study that emerged over the 40-year history of this subfield, topics that were closely linked to the social issues of the day and to persisting cultural preoccupations concerning sexual difference and gender relations. For many feminist psychologists, the study of women and gender often led to critical examinations of methods of research. These examinations began with critiques of conventional research technologies, but soon extended to reflections on epistemological foundations of the discipline and proposals for innovative approaches. We then turn to clinical practice, an arena where feminist psychologists have made major contributions to theory, practice, and ethical discussions. In the final section, we describe some of the many organizations that have brought together psychologists concerned with gender equality, the status of women in the profession, and social change.